During last week, Remembrance Day ceremonies took place across local schools and at local legions, with hundreds of locals pausing for two minutes of silence in remembrance of those who have served and those who still do.
When the scars of two World Wars were still fresh, this two minutes of silence would have held deep personal significance for our ancestors who either served or sent their fathers, brothers, sons, sisters and daughters abroad to fight. When the Commonwealth of Nations began commemorating Remembrance Day following the First World War, to remember armed forces who fell in the line of duty, they also did so with the hope - ‘Never Again.’
While soldiers defend peace and freedom on Canadian soil and abroad, there is a tendency to infuse this solemn duty with grandeur, to imbue it with stories of heroism and valour. But there is nothing grand about the deaths of millions in warfare. There was nothing of beauty in mustard gas, dead bodies, dysentery, trench warfare, or concentration camps, of people coming back to their lives and families with post-traumatic stress disorder and nightmares of the horrors they had seen. One has to be careful not to romanticize the meaning of Remembrance Day or of war.
At local schools, military personnel from Canadian Forces Base Cold Lake came in to talk to students and provided a face to the word “soldier.” They discussed the meaning of Remembrance Day, and the fact that Canada, in modern times, has still been involved in conflict, whether it was in Afghanistan, or more recently, in the front lines of northern Iraq, exchanging fire with extremists.
This is the kind of message that every student needs to hear, that every person needs to hear – that the cost of war is high, that it is someone’s brother, father, sister, mother or daughter on the front battle lines, and so we keep striving to live up to that call issued from armistice –
Never again.
